


Professor Brookstone and the Fatal Iteration

by orphan_account



Category: Lego Ninjago
Genre: Adventure, Gen, I suck at writing romance, I'm a glutton for angst, Mystery, Professor Layton - Freeform, The AU no one wanted or asked for, also cole suffers, bruiseshipping???, but not really, cole gets to be a professor, cole is layton, cole/zane/jay???, do not ask and you'll still receive, glaciershipping???, happens between HoT and SoG, i dunno, jay is luke, just go with it, kinda a crossover?, puzzles kinda, technoshipping???, wu is granny riddleton of course
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-24
Updated: 2018-03-24
Packaged: 2019-04-07 13:17:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14081736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: In the middle of a fight, Cole suddenly loses his elemental abilities without explanation or reason. To get his powers back, Cole and Jay locate the Soul Artifact, a device that may be able to help with the problem. But the Soul Artifact isn’t all they expected, and transports them to another reality - where Cole is a 35-year-old archaeology professor, Jay is his 10-year-old assistant, and they both have strange countdown numbers on their wrists. As time and space keep warping and reality keeps shifting, Cole and Jay are left to wonder: how is this supposed to get Cole’s powers back? And what awaits them when the countdowns reach zero?Also known as: Cole and Jay go on a Professor Layton adventure and suffer the whole way through. Takes place between Hands of Time and Sons of Garmadon.(Don’t worry, you don’t have to be familiar with Professor Layton to know what’s going on!)





	Professor Brookstone and the Fatal Iteration

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! This is my first Ninjago fic on this site. The last time I wrote one was like a year ago. Also, my first kinda-sorta-not-really Professor Layton fic. Please give me nice critique. If something sucks or if I could improve on something, please let me know :)  
> Anyways, thanks for reading this. You guys are all amazing.  
> And if you wanna talk about ninja or fanfiction or both, you can find me on Tumblr at @ninjahijabimuse.  
> Seeya around!  
> ~Muse

The crinkles in the paper had a funny way of matching the worry-lines on Cole’s face.

“Do you think this’ll work?” he asked for perhaps the tenth time.

Jay just gave an affirmative grunt, not bothering to say ‘yes’ for perhaps the tenth time.

“But what if it’s a trap? We’ve got plenty of enemies.”

Jay kept his chin rested in the palm of his hand. He didn’t even spare his friend a glance, captivated by the passing scenery. “And since when has _Mystake_ been an enemy?”   
It was an invalid concern, Cole knew that much, but with so much at stake…

“You can never be too careful,” Cole said, folding the paper into his pocket.   
Jay had grown numb to Cole’s endless spout of negativity and concern. He lost his motivation to lift Cole’s spirits somewhere a few blocks back.

His sharp brown eyes perked at a certain sight, which prompted him to rise and tug on the yellow pull-string. A rushed ‘ding!’ filled the bus, and the LED board at the front declared that a stop had been requested.

Jay shooed Cole out of his aisle seat, and all the way to the door. They both waved and said their thank-yous as they stepped off.

Cole squeezed Jay’s hand.

“You’ll be fine,” Jay said, but it was almost as hostile as it was comforting. “Mystake said she has just the thing to sort out your little issue.”  
“If you say so.” He let Jay lead him to inside by the hand.

Cole kept his head down from the walls of tea and other products, from the bead curtain, from the hanging plants and dim lights. It was better than the threat of rain the sky had posed, but Cole didn’t fair much better with all the clutter.

A small woman with silvery hair and a rice hat emerged. She smiled through the wrinkles. “Ah, you got my letter?” asked her shriveled voice.

He pulled it out of his pocket. “Y-yes. You really can help me?”  
She nodded sagely, and motioned towards the space beyond the bead curtain. “Come here, child.”   
Jay and Cole exchanged glances, following after Mystake. Cole returned the paper to its place in his pocket. Jay leaned in and whispered, “See? Perfectly harmless. Nothing to worry about.”

Cole knew full well he had nothing to worry about, and wasn’t sure where to pinpoint the source of his unease - maybe his condition, maybe the atmosphere, maybe lunch wasn’t sitting well, maybe it was the coffee withdrawals, or how the movie last night might have been a tad too scary for his taste.

The back room wasn’t all too different than the store room, only with more tea and less decorations, and no cash register for that matter. Mystake had disappeared into the folds of the room just as quickly as she’d appeared.

Before they could get the chance to look for her, she appeared again. Cole jolted, clutched his chest with eyes wide. She cackled at that.

The thing she thrusted in his hands was a red paisley tin filled with little violet leaves. If he turned his head just the right angle, they almost shimmered.

“And if I drink this, my powers will return?” Cole fished his callused fingers into the tin and tried to pull out some of the leaves. She swatted his hand away before he could.

“No! Not yet,” she hissed. “That’s for later, when you get home. It’s to calm your nerves. After what you’re about to go through...” She gave a hint of a laugh, but it wasn’t malicious. “You’re going to need it.”  
Mystake’s words only served to worsen Cole’s already omnipresent dejection. Jay squeezed his hand back.

“So where’s the thing you brought up in your letter?” Jay asked, volatility rising. He pulled Cole behind him. Envisioning Jay, in that moment, as a little blue attack dog seemed to help Cole regain a small amount of ease.

She pulled out a strange golden trinket out from one of the nearby boxes. “This is what you seek.”  
Jay slumped. “So it’s not a tea.”   
“Not everything I own is tea, boy,” she grumbled. Mystake knocked him on the head, to which he yelped. “Your old master, Wu, gave this to me a few years ago.”   
“Wu did?” Cole’s eyes widened. His hands grew heavy when Mystake placed the trinket in his palms. It was a thin, golden brace with little clay talismans dangling from it. He rubbed at a dent in the metal ring, absent-minded.

Before Jay could ask for an explanation, Mystake provided. “It is called the Soul Artifact. Legend says that any broken soul who recites the incantation on its talismans shall have their soul repaired.”

“But Cole doesn’t need his soul fixed or whatever,” Jay said, hands flailing about. “He needs his powers restored.”  
“Yeah,” Cole chimed in. “We were in a fight and my powers all the sudden stopped working and I haven’t been able to use them since.”

She tutted, shaking her head, and said, “You still have much to learn. Do you recall how you unlocked your true potentials?”  
“How could we forget?” Cole said with a confused nod. “We each had to overcome some big emotional crisis in order to be able to access our abilities and...oh.”   
Mystake’s laugh was much more gentle this time. “You understand now.”   
Jay raised his hand. “I don’t,” he blurted. Mystake and Cole face-palmed in response.

“You had to overcome an emotional barrier to unlock your true potential, yes?” Mystake said, eyes narrowed and tone sharp. “And Cole cannot use his powers. Which means something is wrong with his true potential.”  
“What, so he got a newer and bigger emotional barrier he has to get over if he wants to use his powers ever again?” Jay asked.

Mystake shrugged at that. “It’s possible. But that is why the Soul Artifact is necessary in restoring your friend’s powers.”

Jay nodded as if he understood what was going on before even Mystake did. “So how does this work then? Because no matter what happens to Cole, I’m coming too.”

Cole gave him a weak smile - Jay _really_ didn’t have to do that. This was Cole’s problem and Cole’s alone. He wasn’t planning on dragging anyone down with him. He didn’t dispute this with Jay, however.

“If you hold on tight, you may just be able to keep him company,” Mystake said, a deep tone of foreboding slithering from her sounds. “Although I doubt you will want to.”

Jay swallowed hard and tried not to shoot Cole a grave expression, the kind of expression that comes when you realize you’ve stepped on a landmine (a mix of both concern for your safety and astonishment because you didn’t think landmines were a thing. You were so horribly wrong).

Unlike Jay, Cole didn’t try not to make that face; he’d been wearing it like a hat since his powers first shorted out.

“Just read the talismans,” she urged.

“What will happen if I do?”  
She shrugged, pacing just a bit with her hands folded behind her. “Only Wu really knows the answer to that. They _were_ his before.”

“And Wu’s missing,” said Jay, pouting. “B-but why did he give this to you?”  
Mystake shrugged yet again, and headed for the bead curtain. Yawning, she said, “Perhaps because I’m an old friend of his. Now - if you’re going to accept my help, you had better do it quick back here. I’ve got a shop to run, you know.”   
She parted from them. They could hear her chatting it up with a customer out front.

Cole leaned his weight onto one of the storage shelves. The Artifact remained heavy and hot in his palm. The clay tabs clanked and clattered as he moved about.

“Let’s do this.” Jay was somehow still as sure as ever, but if Cole listened close enough he could hear a tinge of doubt.

“I don’t know,” Cole said. “What if it’s not safe?”

Jay flung his hands into the air. “What if it’s not - Cole. Cole, we’re _ninja_. I command the very lightning, and you the earth itself. We’ve been to hell and back. We’ve survived snake-people, snake-people wannabes, stone people, countless apocalypses, ghosts, dragons, pirates - “

“I get what you mean.” Cole lifted his hands as a cue for Jay to stop. “But...I’ve had my powers through all that. This time, I don’t. This time, I don’t know what I’m getting myself into. I don’t even think _Mystake_ knows what this Artifact will do to me.”   
Jay and Cole spared a glance at the bead curtain, and at Mystake making a sale.

“Maybe we should head back,” said Cole. “Talk this over with the others.”

“You wanted to keep this between just us,” Jay said, almost offended. “You know, to hide from all the shame of them finding out you’re powerless right now?”  
Cole rubbed the back of his neck. He couldn’t even deny how right Jay was. He inspected the talismans again, the glittery red lettering embedded into their white clay faces. They looked like gibberish, they _were_ gibberish - not any known language Cole could discern (and he could discern a lot, thanks to Zane’s passionate teachings).

But...the red letters started to worm their way into his brain. Squiggling and shifting and moving about, forcing connections and sending electricity through his finger-tips.

Try as he might to drop it, he couldn’t. Try as he might to look away, he couldn’t.

“I...I can read this,” Cole said with a gasp.

“One of the languages Zane taught you?” Jay leaned in to peak over Cole’s broad shoulder.

Cole shook his head, and said, “No. But for some reason it just makes...sense to me.”

“Oh oh oh! Maybe it’s because you’re a ‘broken soul’ or whatever,” Jay reasoned. “I mean, I’m not a broken soul -at least, as far as I can tell - and _I_ can’t read it. Maybe it’s meant for you.”   
Cole fingered the first talisman, then the second, and so on, reciting each of their sounds and stringing them together as words.

To Jay, Cole’s recitation was nothing more than garbled nonsense. Ojibak nisifu reganto.

But to Cole, every letter - every sound - was a pulse of energy throbbing through his blood veins and massaging the backs of his eyes. It was a lullaby, an epic, an enchanted tale told to the beat of a drum and the crackle of a fire pit, an intimate dance. These words meant everything, _were_ everything.

And everything was unraveling him.

It started at his hands. Flesh and matter unwinding, specks of his own body sucking into the center of the Artifact as if he was made of dust. This flaking process spread up his arms and shoulders.

Jay’s screams of horror were foreign to Cole. He kept reciting, entranced, even as he dissipated into a poof of light and smoke.

Jay, who had been holding onto him, followed suit not long after.

The Soul Artifact clattered to the ground with a soft, tinny clank.

 

~~~

 **  
** _“What the hell was that out there, Cole?! I needed you to back me up back then? Because you didn’t help out, Zane got totaled and Kai broke his wrist!”_

 _Cole backed away. “I - I don’t know! One minute I’m fighting, the next my powers are suddenly gone.”_   
_“What do you mean, gone?” Jay frowned. “They can’t just disappear like that.”_ _  
Cole stared down at his clenched fists, tried to summon up some small amount of power. Something, anything. Nothing happened. _

He awoke a strange jolt. Although it wasn’t really ‘waking’ per se, since he hadn’t fallen asleep to begin with.

An alien sensation crackled under his skin, but it wasn’t uncomfortable.

His hands were fine, his arms were fine. He was wearing and outfit he didn’t remember, but he’d get to that once he addressed a much larger problem: why was he holding a steering wheel?

He screamed, swerving around on a dirt road. Another person’s voice chimed in.

An evergreen car passing the opposite direction honked at him, but Cole paid them no heed.

Still swerving, a familiar voice burst at his side.

“What the - what’s going on?!”  
At Cole’s side was a small boy, who couldn’t have been much older than ten or twelve. He was small, with a blue sweater and matching blue newsboy hat, and a messenger bag. The boy had red hair and freckles.

“Jay?!”  
The boy looked up at him. “Cole?!”   
The quaint red car they drove kept its dangerous swerving.

“W-watch your driving!” he shrieked, and pointed at the road.

Cole made on final swerve to the side of the road and parked it there. He looked down at who he thought was Jay. “What the hell? You’re so...so little.”

“And you’re so _old_ ,” Jay snarked in return, prompting Cole to check himself in the rear view mirror.

Jay was right once again, Cole was old. Age had set into his eyes and sunken into his cheeks. Although, Cole wasn’t old like Wu or Mystake - more like middle-aged, like Ronin or Dareth.

There was a black top hat on his head, with an orange band around it. He clasped its brim and inspected the rest of his attire: black coat with the collar turned up, orange button-up, black slacks, dress shoes. Seems he had a theme going.

Likewise, Jay also had a theme. At least the colours - black and blue - fit with who they were.

“Okay, what the _heck_ is going on?” Jay tossed his hands in the air.

“I think…” Cole looked out at the grassy pastures and evergreen trees beyond. “I think we’re in the Artifact.”  
Jay snorted. “Some artifact. I thought this was supposed to help you get your powers back, not...whatever all this is.”   
“Well, maybe it is,” Cole said. He pointed at the messenger bag in Jay’s lap. “Maybe that can give us some clues.”   
Jay’s eyes sparked with epiphany, and did as Cole had instructed. Inside were a few newspaper clippings, an empty notebook, a pen, and an envelope.

The newspaper clippings all had titles like, “Professor Brookstone Solves the Case!”, “Local Archaeologist Locates Golden Garden”, “Scotland Yard Consultant at it Again”, or “Gressenheller University’s Youngest Professor Catches Masked Gentleman”. In all the pictures, Cole was smiling with a little Jay beside him striking some bravado pose. The articles described Jay as, “Jay Walker, Brookstone’s self-proclaimed apprentice.”

“I would never, in a million years, call myself your apprentice,” Jay insisted with a furious blush.

Cole rolled his eyes, and picked up the envelope. He read the contents of the letter inside.

“Well? What does it say?” Jay tried to lean in to read it for himself, but he was too small. Cole put up his hand, signaling for Jay to wait. He crossed his arms and sank back into his seat.

Once Cole finished reading the letter inside, he handed it over to Jay. “Apparently we’re headed to a town called St. Mystere? Someone named ‘Lady Misako’ has requested our presence in helping with a -”

“Inheritance dispute,” Jay said, almost disappointed. “At ‘Garmadon Manor’. Which raises a few questions: first, what is going on? Second, what’s up with ‘Lady Misako’? Does that mean Misako’s here too? Third, where is St. Mystere? Fourth, why are _we_ helping with an inheritance dispute? Fifth, how is this helping you get your powers back? Sixth, what is going on?!”

Cole bit back a chuckle. “I don’t know how to answer any of those questions. But I think we need to go to St. Mystere.”  
Jay dug through the envelope a bit more, trying to pry something out. “Why so?”   
Shrugging, Cole replied, “As far as I understand, we don’t know jack squat when it comes to what’s going on or what we’re doing here, or where we even are - or _who_ we are, for that matter. I think we might find answers in St. Mystere. It’s not like we have any other clues.”

Jay’s frown didn’t soften, not until he successfully pulled out a folded sheet of paper from the envelope. He unfolded it.

“What’s that?” Cole asked.

“It looks like a map,” Jay said. “According to this little note at the top, it’s a map to St. Mystere...dangit.”  
“What?”   
“It’s a _puzzle_. And if we want to know where St. Mystere even is, we have to solve this stupid puzzle.”

“Well that’s helpful.”  
Cole offered to help, but Jay insisted that he was better with puzzles. He could solve this in no time.

Lo and behold, he managed to solve the puzzle woven into the map, identify the correct location of St. Mystere, and guide Cole in its direction.

Cole started the car again, and carefully coaxed it back onto the road. This time, he didn’t swerve about like a madman.

The long yet scenic drive was filled with speculative dialogue - what ifs, if thens, then whats. The two of them entertained any and every possibility that could have been behind their predicament. Ultimately, they couldn’t ascertain anything concrete until they arrived in St. Mystere.

A large border wall met them from the front, with an upturned drawbridge. Cole parked the car and exited. He helped Jay out, although Jay bitterly held onto his pride and insisted on getting out by himself.

The car doors slammed. Cole held the brim of his hat as he looked up at the buildings on the other side. Most of them were average houses with average rooftops, but at the farthest end of town, a precarious tower loomed. It looked more like a toddler stacking wood blocks, only in the most structurally unsound way possible. He tried to not let it bother him.

Before returning his hand to his side, a strange mark caught his eye.

He bared his wrist for Jay to see. “Jay, look at this.”  
Jay peered in. Dark and maroon-black, driven deep into his skin was a number.

“Three? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Do you have one too, Jay?”

Jay checked his wrist, and his eyes widened. Swallowing, he nodded. “Y...yes. But what’s it supposed to mean?”

Cole pulled down his sleeve, giving the town one more look. “Well, one thing’s for certain: the answers we seek are all behind this wall.”


End file.
